"Andrew R. D'Uva" <ard@ctcg.com> (06/27/91)
I'm sure that a few of the telecom readers are familiar with the
service outage which affected C&P telephone customers in (at least)
Washington, D.C. and Virginia on Wednesday. I have a few questions
concerning what happened, and I hoped some of you telecom experts
could fill me in on why the network behaved as it did.
First of all, my exchange is 703/525. I have no idea what kind of
switch this is (anyone?) but when connections are established, there
is a definite "click" when the call starts ringing. Call waiting and
forward-on-busy/no answer are both available here. During the outage
calls could be placed to other phones in the 703/525 exchange without
problem, and calls originating on long distance carriers could be made
and received. Dial tone took from 20-60 seconds. Before the dial
tone, it sounded as though the phone had been taken off-hook for an
extended period of time (warbling noise, the same as when I receive a
call and the calling party has disconnected). Calls to other
exchanges were met with:
a) A new dial tone, which could be dialed on.
b) A fast busy signal
c) A switch to the "warbling" hang-up noise, followed by b.
But here's the question. Before the fast busy signal, there was a
break, as if the circuit was switched out, waiting for a connection.
In fact, making long distance or 800 calls resulted in a one or two
second of "disconnect" before connecting with the LD carrier. Just
what was going on here? It seemed as if the network was able to
connect to LD carriers, but very "slowly", if that makes sense.
Also interesting was the fact that calls to the operator, which rarely
completed , would result in the operator being able to place ANY call.
How come the operator could complete the calls? Were the trunking
arrangements different for the operator?
Finally, calling 1 + Access Code + 202 + [normally local number]
resulting in the call completing to Washington, D.C. over the LDC's
circuits. I can't wait to get the bill for these! Shouldn't these
calls have been disallowed? After all, they are local calls. Well,
enough questions. I await the answers!
Andrew D'Uva ard@ctcg.COM {well-connected}!uupsi!ctcg!ard